SHE CASTS SAFETY NET FOR ADDICTS

SMITHFIELD -- With her carefully coiffed gray hair, Sunday-best dresses and
silver angel charm necklace, 57-year-old Faye Mozingo is often taken for a
pushover by her drug rehab clients, all multiple felons. Some lie about
whether they are clean. Many make excuses for missing meetings. Others fake
their drug tests. They soon learn not to bother.

"Every time we tried to come at her, she knew it was coming before we even
said it. It was scary," said Donna Solomon, 37, who completed Mozingo's
course last year. "She would say, 'Don't come at me with those lines. Throw
that away, and come at me with something else.' "

The same determination that Mozingo brings to her counseling has also been
the driving force behind the REAP (Rehabilitate and Educate Adult
Probationers) program, an alternative sentencing program in Johnston County
for people who might not succeed under normal probation.

REAP was conceived as a treatment program, but Mozingo, the program
coordinator, has built it into something more -- a safety net for addicts
struggling to rebuild their lives. Along with other counselors and
probation officers, Mozingo works long hours to help the probationers
secure jobs, housing, schooling and transportation, even opening her own
closet to clothe them.

"They're human beings. They bleed. They have hearts. They have families,"
she said recently as she stood outside a REAP meeting room. "I would
probably lay my life down for any one of them that's sitting in that room
today."

In Johnston County, where law enforcement officials say drugs are the
common denominator in the majority of crimes, the REAP program has achieved
significant results. Probation and parole officers say that substance-abuse
treatment programs are lucky if one in three clients stays clean. In the
past nine months, 41 percent of REAP clients have successfully completed
the six-month program, not only staying away from crime, but also passing
drug tests, maintaining jobs and living in stable homes.

Lawyer Joy Jones has worked closely with REAP for two years, chairing the
county board that distributes funding for the program.

"Our success rate," she said, "is Faye Mozingo."

Solomon, a recovering cocaine addict, was sent to REAP after she was
videotaped selling drugs to an undercover officer. She graduated from the
program last year, works at Biscuitville in Clayton and has regained
custody of her five teenage daughters.

The first time they met in a group session, Solomon told Mozingo about the
pain in her past: abusive relationships, the family duties she had
abandoned, her life on the streets as a drug courier.

"She was like, 'Just because you've been out there on the streets, and
you've been through what you've been through, that doesn't make you less of
a person,' " Solomon said.

No one, Solomon said, had ever told her that.

"In prison, I was a statistic. On the street, I was just another person,"
she said. "But with her, I was somebody."

More than two decades ago, an accident sent Mozingo down her own path to
alcoholism and depression. At a factory job in South Carolina, she fell
when she tried to lift a heavy piece of machinery and a co-worker missed
the other end. She ruptured three disks in her spine; doctors said she
would never walk again.

For the next five years, Mozingo was in and out of a body cast, taking
morphine through a hole in the cast. She was soon hooked, then switched to
drinking -- at first until she got drunk, later until she would pass out.

"I got smart and thought drinking would help the pain," she said.

And, defying doctors, she learned to walk with just a slight limp after two
years of therapy.

"I'm a very stubborn person, and I don't like people telling me what to
do," she said. "So when the doctor said I wouldn't walk, I wanted to darn
prove him wrong."

She and her husband, Jerry, eventually moved back to their hometown of Four
Oaks in southern Johnston County, but she continued to numb herself with
alcohol. On the day after New Year's in 1985, without telling her family
that she was leaving, she checked herself into Day by Day Treatment Center,
a private live-in rehabilitation facility in Selma.

"I just got tired, sick and tired of the life I was living," she said.

Mozingo was one of the first clients at Day by Day's new program for women.
At 39, she was also the oldest.

"She was a very nice person, but a little belligerent," recalled counselor
Garland H. Sewell. "She was never in denial or anything like that. She put
her shoulder to the plow."

Six weeks later, she left treatment and began working at Day by Day as a
weekend manager while holding down two other jobs, in a department store
and as a private nurse, to help support her family and pay off her
treatment bill.

"She worked the jobs that nobody wanted, really," Sewell said. "She was the
bus driver, the baby sitter for the women on the weekends."

She also returned to school, studying substance-abuse treatment, and
steadily climbed the ranks at Day by Day. She became manager of the women's
program, then manager of the women's and men's programs, and then, for
almost a decade, the center's executive director. During her tenure, she
helped secure a $1 million federal loan for the cash-strapped center and
oversaw its move to a new, 20-bed facility in 1990.

She left Day by Day in 1996 to recover from recurring intestinal problems
caused by her years of drinking. But she couldn't stay away from counseling
and began working at a private company, Johnston Counseling Services. In
2000, the business won a contract to provide counseling for the REAP program.

REAP, an outpatient program that can take as many as 36 probationers,
hummed along with Mozingo at the helm. She and other counselors held
thrice-weekly meetings at night and screened the probationers for drug
violations. She stayed busy helping dozens of clients at a time meet their
basic needs but always found time to talk one on one with struggling
clients or soothe worried family members.

And if the clients failed a drug screening, the fax machine would start
clicking at the probation office the next morning.

"I have never met anyone quite like her," said Donald Jones, chief
probation and parole officer for Johnston County. "Faye is a combination of
a caring, giving person with a drill sergeant mentality."

In July 2002, with the state budget unresolved, REAP lost its $97,000
annual grant from the state. Mozingo found private funds to pay the rent on
the office, and the county loaned the money for utilities. A month went by,
then two. Jones told Mozingo to shut down the phones and turn off the
lights, but she refused.

"I just could not see shutting a program like this down," said Mozingo, who
argues that REAP saves tax money. "We have to take care of [the
probationers] anyway, whether they're in prison or jail. At least it gets
them out where they could get a job and be self-sufficient."

Finally, in October, word came that the state had finished its budget and
that REAP could keep its doors open, but Mozingo said no one could have
stopped her from going to work every day.

"Where there's life and breath, there's hope, and as long as they are
willing, there has to be somebody to help them," she said. "It doesn't have
to be me, because I'm getting old. But somebody has to be there."